It was just before the long holiday weekend, and everyone knows that holiday weekends are made for fun. Everyone, that is, except a young service tech still honing his skills. To these misguided auto enthusiasts, a holiday weekend means working on your buddy’s car – for free.
Beanie asked if he could use the shop on Saturday. “My buddy Jake wants some help mounting new tires and wheels on his pickup.” He held out a brown paper bag. “I kinda owe him one.”
“Sure,” I said, accepting his bribe. I opened the bag and peeked inside at the container of butterscotch-caramel coffee flavoring. “Good choice. Just be sure to clean up the place when you’re done.”
The plan was to be finished with the tire swap in time to catch an afternoon movie downtown with their girlfriends. But as Basil would say, the best laid plans of mice and apprentices often go astray.
The lights were still on when I drove by the shop around noon, so I stopped in to investigate. “Why so gloomy, girls?” I asked, coming into the lunchroom where Samantha and Alley were waiting impatiently.
Samantha frowned fiercely as she paged through a magazine. “Beanie and Jake are having troubles,” she snarled. “It looks like we’re gonna miss our movie.”
Alley, Jake’s girlfriend, was redoing her nails. “Sam, I say we ditch the guys and go to the movie ourselves.” She looked up at me. “Can you give us a ride?”
“Whoa,” I said. “What seems to be the problem? Surely it can’t take that long to change four tires.”
Sam tossed the magazine aside. “The tires are changed, but they can’t get the tire pressure monitoring light to go out.” She looked at me pleadingly. “They need serious help, Slim. Could you please take a look?”
Out in the shop I found the guys slouched dejectedly in the front seat of Jake’s 2008 Silverado. Jake sighed. “Bean, you told me you knew how to do this stuff. If we don’t get outta here soon, Alley’s gonna freak!”
Seeing me come in, Beanie scrambled out of the truck in a panic. “Am I ever glad to see you, boss! This TPMS stuff is driving me crazy!”
I surveyed the used tires and wheels scattered across the bay. “Okay, where’re we at?”
Beanie pointed to the truck. “Jake wanted a new look for his ride, so we’ve replaced the original tires and wheels with these.” The KMC Backseat rims with 37×12.5R18 BFGoodrich tires were a definite improvement over the stock equipment. “I swapped over the TPMS sensors to the new wheels, just like Basil told me,” he continued. “As far as I can tell, we didn’t damage a thing.”
He reached into the cab and pulled out the owner’s manual.
“Next we went through the relearn procedure, using the high/low tire pressure method. You know, where you raise or lower the tire pressure until the horn beeps once? Then you move on to the next tire and do it again.”
I surveyed the battle scene. “Did you start with the left front tire?”
“Yup.”
“And when you finished with the last tire, did you get two beeps, signaling that the relearn process was successful?”
Beanie nodded again. “That part’s fine. The problem comes when I try to set the tire pressures.”
I frowned. “Aren’t you using the tire pressures from the placard on the door pillar?”
He sighed. “Well, no. On this model, the original tires called for 50 psi in the front and 80 psi in the rear. But the new tires are 50 psi all around.” Beanie threw up his hands. “Somehow I have to tell the system what the new pressures are, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to do that!”
I chuckled. “Okay, I see where you’re coming from. Have you got the Tech 2 connected?”
Beanie jerked his thumb towards the truck. “Yup. We’ve been staring at it for hours, but I don’t see anything that talks about tire pressures.”
He retrieved the scan tool from Jake, who’d been fiddling with the control buttons. “Hey man, what a lame video game. All it does is show you numbers.”
Ignoring him, I directed Beanie back to the main menu screen. “The tire pressure monitor functions are held in the remote control door lock module (RCDLM). Once you’re in there, go to module setup and you’ll be able set the load range and pressure of the front and rear tires.”
Beanie shook his head in disbelief. “The remote control door lock module? I never would have thought to look there!”
I went back to the lunchroom and let the girls know it was almost showtime. Alley squealed with delight and waved her purple nails in the air to dry them. But Sam seemed distracted. “Slim,” she said, “I’ve got a question. I’ve been dating Beanie for a while now, and this is not the first time that a vehicle has interfered with our dates. It’s…it’s almost like cars are more important than people…” Her voice trailed off as she looked at me. “Is this something I need to think about?”
I gulped. The reality is that anyone dating a tire guy or service tech needs to get used to days like this, days when things don’t go as planned. But we have enough strikes against us already – dirty fingernails, gashed knuckles, clothes that smell like oil and grease. I certainly wasn’t about to throw a crescent wrench into Beanie’s love life by telling her to like it or lump it.
Instead, it was time to dispense a tidbit of tactful wisdom. Unfortunately, I was the only wisdom-dispenser in the room, and to be honest, I have more success fixing fuel injection than counseling women. But I gave it my best shot.
“Sam, every career choice has its high and low points,” I pointed out. “The key is to remember that life is like a Tech 2 scan tool: as long as we communicate well, and know where the pressure limits are kept, then the system will serve us well.”
Sam stared at me like I was crazy. “Huh?”
“Yeah,” said Alley. “That was weird.”
I decided to let Beanie fend for himself. It was time to go home and be with the family. After all, isn’t that what holiday weekends are for?
Rick Cogbill, a freelance writer and former shop owner in Summerland, B.C., has written The Car Side for a variety of trade magazines for the past 15 years. “A Fine Day for a Drive,” his first book based on the characters from this column, is now available for order at thecarside.com.
